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Plank is a simple, lightweight dock written in Vala. The application, which is available by default in elementary OS, features multiple hide modes, customizable screen position, theme and icon size, supports pinning apps to the dock, quicklists and more.

Plank 0.9.0 as released a couple of days ago, bringing new features and bug fixes, such as:

animated adding and removing items;

added Window Dodge hide mode (the dock will hide if it obstructs any window);

it's now possible to set a hide delay;

Plank now provides a simple dbus-interface with some methods for remote-controlling;

It's also worth mentioning that Plank was added to the official Ubuntu (and Debian experimental) repositories with the latest Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet (to be released later this month).

While Unity users already have a dock available by default (the Unity Launcher), Plank can be a useful addition to quite a few desktop environments like MATE and Xfce - especially if you use a global menu on the top MATE or Xfce panel -, GNOME (Shell) and so on.

Install Plank 0.9.0

elementary OS Freya, released a few days ago, ships with Plank 0.8.0 however, the latest Plank 0.9.0 should already be available as an update. Note that the new 'Window Dodge' hide mode is not displayed in the elementary OS System Settings yet.

To install Plank in Ubuntu-based Linux distributions and flavors (Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, etc.) from its stable PPA, use the following commands: